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Hey, Marfa: Poems
An extraordinary lyric and visual meditation on place, nature, and art rippling out from Marfa, Texas
Situated in the outreaches of southwest Texas, the town of Marfa has long been an oasis for artists, immigrants looking for work, and ranchers, while the ghosts of the indigenous and the borders between languages and nations are apparent everywhere. The poet and translator Jeffrey Yang experienced the vastness of desert, township, sky, and time itself as a profound clash of dislocation and familiarity. What does it mean to survive in a physical and metaphorical desert? How does a habitat long associated with wilderness and death become a center for nourishment and art?
Out of those experiences and questions, Yang has fashioned a fascinating, multifaceted work--an anti-travel guide, an anti-Western, a book of last words--that is a lyrical, anthropological investigation into history, culture, and extremity of place. Paintings and drawings of Marfa's landscapes and substations by the artist Rackstraw Downes intertwine with Yang's texts as mutual nodes and lines of energy. Hey, Marfa is a desert diary scaled to music that aspires to emit particles of light.
Situated in the outreaches of southwest Texas, the town of Marfa has long been an oasis for artists, immigrants looking for work, and ranchers, while the ghosts of the indigenous and the borders between languages and nations are apparent everywhere. The poet and translator Jeffrey Yang experienced the vastness of desert, township, sky, and time itself as a profound clash of dislocation and familiarity. What does it mean to survive in a physical and metaphorical desert? How does a habitat long associated with wilderness and death become a center for nourishment and art?
Out of those experiences and questions, Yang has fashioned a fascinating, multifaceted work--an anti-travel guide, an anti-Western, a book of last words--that is a lyrical, anthropological investigation into history, culture, and extremity of place. Paintings and drawings of Marfa's landscapes and substations by the artist Rackstraw Downes intertwine with Yang's texts as mutual nodes and lines of energy. Hey, Marfa is a desert diary scaled to music that aspires to emit particles of light.
184 pages, Paperback
Published October 2, 2018
2 people are currently reading
125 people want to read
About the author
Jeffrey Yang
29 books9 followersJeffrey Yang is a poet, translator, and editor at New Directions Publishing Corp. He translated the Qian Jia Shi under the title Rhythm 226, and his poetry has appeared in the Nation, the Paris Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Beacon, New York."
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
March 1, 2019
Yang draws landscapes with words to enlarge Downes' artwork, which contrasts the curves of the natural with the lines of the man-made. Populated with eccentrics, myths, history and the fires that are burning our land and our humanity, Yang's poetry both cuts and heals. Interspersed with the last words of historical figures, Yang asks us to consider what constitutes both life and the transitions that include dying and becoming a memory permanently embedded in the life of another human, time, place.
How can we be and what do we leave behind?
living memory
retold
through the seasons
icons into stories
Words and images arranged and rearranged--in the telling what has gone before becomes newly alive.
How can we be and what do we leave behind?
living memory
retold
through the seasons
icons into stories
Words and images arranged and rearranged--in the telling what has gone before becomes newly alive.
March 10, 2021
Have you ever noticed the brilliance in something, but not been able to fully understand it? It's kind of like seeing the perfect confection but being diabetic and not being able to partake of it.
I sort of feel that way about Hey, Marfa.
In the interest of complete transparency, I've never been a fan of poetry. I think my brain is simply too literal to enjoy it the way others do. I try, but I know my brain falls short. That's part of the problem for me with this book.
The other part is that Mr. Yang is a translator and he is FREAKING BRILLIANT. He drops Spanish, Latin, and (forgive me, Chinese? Japanese? It's Kanji but that's all I can say for a certainty) into his poems. When left untranslated, it leaves gaps in my understanding that my lack of poetical skill is woefully unable to fill.
That said, I can SEE the brilliance there...but cannot touch it...like the sun.
I will say I truly did enjoy his poem "Javelina" and the words he recorded that had been written on a high school trash can in sharpie. I found his collection of last words inspiring...and troubling...and I'm sure I was meant to.
It's a great book. Give it a try. Hopefully you'll be able to understand where I did not.
I sort of feel that way about Hey, Marfa.
In the interest of complete transparency, I've never been a fan of poetry. I think my brain is simply too literal to enjoy it the way others do. I try, but I know my brain falls short. That's part of the problem for me with this book.
The other part is that Mr. Yang is a translator and he is FREAKING BRILLIANT. He drops Spanish, Latin, and (forgive me, Chinese? Japanese? It's Kanji but that's all I can say for a certainty) into his poems. When left untranslated, it leaves gaps in my understanding that my lack of poetical skill is woefully unable to fill.
That said, I can SEE the brilliance there...but cannot touch it...like the sun.
I will say I truly did enjoy his poem "Javelina" and the words he recorded that had been written on a high school trash can in sharpie. I found his collection of last words inspiring...and troubling...and I'm sure I was meant to.
It's a great book. Give it a try. Hopefully you'll be able to understand where I did not.
September 29, 2018
A bit too opaque for my taste. And not enough of the local flavor or imagery for what I would have liked - when reading this celebration of a town I so want to visit. Oh well.
March 13, 2022
My favorites were the poems concerned with translation, although the substation poems contain beautiful descriptions
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February 9, 2019“K. took us to the canyon / down through the wash / where Appalachia meets the Rockies / glass scarps above alkaline flats / succulent blossoms / curved-teeth leaves / pyrrhuloxia on a bow-dark tree, road / runner’s moment’s notice, no wasted sweetness “ —from poem “Fold”
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews